Solar by Ian McEwan: review

How do you turn global warming into a fit subject for fiction, asks Tibor
Fischer. In Solar Ian McEwan uses comedy mixed with menace

Readers of Ian McEwan’s other novels will find familiar elements in Solar, but they might be surprised by the way they are mixed. You wait for something unpleasant to happen and you’re not disappointed, though it might not be in the way you’ve expected. Those who know McEwan’s debut, the collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites, will remember that, stirred in with all the weirdness and darkness that was to flourish so plentifully in the later books, there was some rather fine humour (and let’s not forget McEwan’s most farcical outing of all: the uncollected but amusing Vaginismus that appeared in the top-shelf magazine Club in 1978 and which gave me the perfect excuse for buying a copy).

With Solar and the antics of Michael Beard, his latest protagonist, McEwan has produced a book that might not fully qualify as a comic novel, but it is certainly his most comic. Beard is a physicist, a Nobel laureate, who like many middle-aged physicists and mathematicians suspects that his best work is far behind him. In any case, most of his time is taken up with his philandering, since Beard’s pecker is as errant as any Premiership footballer’s.

Thus Solar is chiefly a mash-up of the Hampstead adultery novel and a conflation of the Bradbury/Lodge academic satire, with the merest dash of politics (George W, New Labour spin), and a side order of the trusty McEwan standby of violence.

It is also being pushed as an eco-novel. When I read the phrases 'save the world from environmental disaster’ and 'the most pressing and complex problem of our time’ on the dust jacket, I feared greatly for my reading pleasure. Beard is involved in a number of projects to create a source of power that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels.

Terms such as 'global warming’ and 'climate change’ in my opinion are great reefs of triteness waiting to sink any narrative that gets too close, but McEwan skilfully pilots around the platitudes and tedious debates, while making the point that he has done his homework on physics, photovoltaics and wind-turbines (M-theory, E8 'one of the bulkier residents of the Platonic realm’, Betz’s law).

McEwan has always displayed an Orwellian economy in his prose and Solar is no exception. Beard is made the head of a new National Centre for Renewable Energy; its character is pithily summed up in a couple of sentences. A fence has been erected around the site without the consent of the senior management: 'It represented, they soon found out, 17 per cent of the first year’s budget.’ Such succinct assessments and observations abound.

Based on McEwan’s own experiences during a trip to the Arctic blankness of Spitsbergen (it’s so good it had to be true), Beard goes on a snowmobile expedition with a pack of worried Greens and concerned artists to see some melting ice, the hilarity of which alone warrants the purchase of this book. I was reading Solar while waiting for a delayed flight at Gatwick and the power of Beard’s misadventures was such that I didn’t mind at all.

Anyone who has ever been to a conference or artists’ colony will sympathise with Beard’s emotions, when 'on arrival, as he passed through the mess room on his way to find his quarters, the first thing he had seen, propped in a corner, was an acoustic guitar, surely awaiting its strummer and a tyrannous sing-along’.

Like many prominent writers, McEwan has endured accusations of plagiarism, typically on the flimsiest of grounds. There was a ridiculous palaver over material McEwan had acknowledged in Atonement and two years ago McEwan read out a section of Solar at the Hay festival which immediately invited comparisons with a passage from Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Beard returns to London from abroad and needs to sate his crisps addiction, so he immediately buys a packet. To his amazement, a thuggish passenger opposite him on the train picks up the crisp packet on the table and helps himself. They have a face-off as the two of them consume the packet. Seething at this loutish behaviour, Beard gets off the train only to discover that the packet he had bought is still in his pocket, and that he was scoffing the thug’s crisps.

Beard recounts this story during a lecture and is immediately slapped down by an academic who points out this is a well-established urban myth, 'The Unwitting Thief’, which dates back 100 years. Adams (whose version features biscuits rather than crisps) always insisted, like Beard, that the incident really happened to him.

It doesn’t matter finally whether McEwan had a recollection of Adams’s biscuits buried away in his memory, because if you compare the writing, the treatment of the story couldn’t be more different. It’s a good example of how McEwan can move from comedy, a paean to the crisp ('this particular chemical feast could not be found in Paris, Berlin or Tokyo’) to real menace.

But as this is McEwan, the laughs fade away. The denouement of Solar in sunny New Mexico is not predictable but is predictably bleak, and my only reservation about the novel is that the end is a bit of a jolt, the brakes are applied rather forcefully. But perhaps this is because McEwan is planning Solar II. I hope so because I rather like Michael Beard.